Shark bite victim used martial arts training to escape shark

Joshua Watson, a 14-year-old from Summerville is recovering after undergoing surgery for a shark bite that happened while he was swimming at Kiawah Island's Beachwalker Park on Tuesday.

The teen is a 2nd degree black belt in karate. He used his martial arts training to fight off the shark.

"So I tried to jerk my ankle away and I accidentally punched the shark," said Watson.

Delivering a quick punch to the nose, Watson says it was instinct when his karate skills kicked in.

"I think it did scare it," said Watson.

Playing a game in the water that turned all too real, Watson and his sister were pretending to be sharks while swimming.

Watson said, "At first I was actually really surprised because I never thought I would get bit by a shark, so it was kind of scary at first."

The punch may have turned the shark away, but not before it left a row of teeth marks on Watson's right leg.

"I tried to stay calm because the more your adrenaline rushes, the more blood comes out," said Watson.

He learned that trick from a movie, not Jaws the all time classic shark movie, but Soul Surfer. It's a movie about the true story of a young woman's journey back to surfing after losing her arm to a horrific shark bite.

Best wishes to that kid and his family. A guy I knew from my school days JP Andrew got his right leg bitten off by a shark. It washed up on a beach across False Bay a couple of weeks later. Even if it was accidental, wasn't it Archilochus that said "We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training"?

That bit JP? A great white. They're quite troublesome in False Bay because unlike most other sharks they can actually develop a taste for human flesh, rather than just biting because they mistake you for a seal or something else. Most other sharks will bite you once and spit you out, but some great whites will bite repeatedly and tear chunks out of the victim and swallow them.

We've got shark watch over almost the whole of False Bay now as we have several attacks and deaths related to great whites every year. Of course they're big business so tourist boats take cage divers out and chum the water to ****, which really doesn't help. The tourists are either ignorant or don't really care, they just want to pay their money and have their thrill.